New: ChinaOB Daily: News roundup on Chinese outbound travel

Editor’s note: China’s outbound visitors is the biggest force in all of the global travel industry right now, and Skift’s been covering developments and changes over the last year. From today, we’re starting a new daily roundup of news — ChinaOB Daily— affecting outbound business, for countries trying to attract Chinese travelers. This is our first step in a larger dedicated product down the road.

• Australian retail stories start accepting China’s most popular credit card: Upmarket retailers are ..accepting the bank card that most middle-class Chinese hold: UnionPay…it is expanding rapidly in Australia with help from big Australian banks such as Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank. The acceptance rate is expected to increase from 12 per cent to 40 per cent at the end of year.
• Chinese visitors to Canada up 15% in 2012: The amount of Chinese visitors in Canada increased to more than 273,000 in 2012, which is a 15.5 percent increase from the 2011 figure of 236,700. The tourists stayed for 29.8 nights on average and spent a total of 485.5 million Canadian dollars (USD 466.7 million).
• Dubai’s annual shopping festival goes after Chinese, Russian tourists: This year’s Dubai Summer Surprises hopes to tap into the almost Dh532 billion spent by Chinese and Russian tourists worldwide last year. “We have run campaigns in the GCC, India, China and Russia and we are expecting visitors from these countries to visit during the festival,” said a spokesman.
• “Ugly Chinese are the new Ugly Americans“: Chinese are now the biggest tourist group, dropping, as a whole, $102 billion overseas in 2012…However, the Chinese are beginning to feel a lack of respect for this power at the very same time that many in the foreign countries they’re visiting are coming to see them as economically necessary but loathsome.
• Robberies of Chinese tourists in Paris on rise: A sharp increase in robberies of Chinese tourists in Paris  — up 10 percent since last year — has prompted calls for the French government to step up security and for shoppers to use credit cards instead of carrying large amounts of cash.
• Phuket tourism not welcoming enough for Chinese visitors: About 1.5 million Chinese tourists came into Thailand from January to April this year, and the lack of transport meant many were kept waiting and were otherwise inconvenienced.